Archives

Follow us on Twitter

When publishers mess up, why do authors pay the price?

Springer has retracted two papers, which appeared online earlier this year in different journals, after discovering both were published by mistake.

A spokesperson at Springer explained that the retractions are “due to a human error.”

According to one of the retraction notices, published in Archive for Mathematical Logic, the paper had not yet undergone peer review and the author plans to resubmit his paper to the journal. The other retraction notice, published in Arabian Journal of Geosciences, simply states that an “error in the submission system” is to blame. Unfortunately, in both cases the authors now have a retraction on their record, seemingly through no fault of their own.

Neither notice indicates what publisher glitches led to the premature publications. We asked the spokesperson for clarity, but she did not elaborate. When asked whether Springer has made changes to prevent these errors from happening again, the spokesperson said:

Misunderstandings such as these occur very seldom. All parties involved in the review process have been alerted to take care when administering the manuscript submission system.

The Editor-in-Chief is retracting this article because it was published in error before undergoing peer review. The author agrees with this retraction and will be resubmitting his manuscript for review. The Editor-in-Chief apologizes to the author and to readers. The online version of this article contains the full text of the retracted article as electronic supplementary material.

The above-mentioned article is retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief in consultation with the Senior Publishing Editor per the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) guidelines on scientific misconduct.

The Editor in Chief has retracted this article because it was mistakenly published due to an error in the submission system. The authors agree with the retraction.

“Publisher errors,” not “retractions?”

The spokesperson explained both retractions were due to human error, adding:

However, the retractions are unrelated in that they concern completely different journals with no overlap in terms of users of the submission system.

One thought on “When publishers mess up, why do authors pay the price?”

Certain mistakes should not be punishable by law especially when the subject is discovered not be a direct defaulter and must not be held responsible for an identified error. However, Authors and Publishers must be careful in their individual roles to avoid costly mistakes that could lead to extraction of papers. The Author in this circumstance should be allowed to resubmit his paper for proper review and publishing.